PAUL BERT

(November 21, 1886.)

Victor Hugo and Gambetta have their places in the Pantheon of history,
and Death is beginning his harvest among the second rank of the founders
of the present French Republic, Every one of these men was an earnest
Freethinker as well as a staunch Republican. Paul Bert, who has just
died at Tonquin at the post of duty, was one of the band of patriots
who gathered round Gambetta in his Titanic organisation of the National
Defence; a band from which has come most of those who have since been
distinguished in the public life of France. After the close of the war,
Paul Bert became a member of the National Assembly, in which he has
held his seat through all political changes. As a man of science he was
eminent and far-shining, being not a mere doctrinaire but a practical
experimentalist whose researches were of the highest interest and
importance. His Manual of Elementary Science, which has been recently
translated into English, is in use in nearly every French school, and
there is no other volume of the kind that can be compared with it for
a moment. As a friend and promoter of general education, Paul Bert was
without a rival. He strove in season and out of season to raise the
standard of instruction, to elevate the status of teachers, and to free
them from the galling tyranny of priests. It is not too much to say
that Paul Bert was the idol of nine-tenths of the schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses in the French rural districts, where the evils he
helped to remove had been most rampant.

This distinguished Frenchman is now dead at the comparatively early age
of fifty-three. Although his illness was so serious, the French premier
telegraphed that it would be impolitic for the Resident General to leave
Tonquin suddenly. Thereupon Paul Bert replied, "You are right; it is
better to die at my post than for me to quit Tonquin at the present
moment." That dispatch was the last he was able to send himself.
Subsequent dispatches came, from other hands, and at last the news
arrived that Paul Bert was dead. The French premier announced the fact
from the Tribune in a broken voice and amid profound silence. "The
Chamber loses in him," said M. de Freycinet, "one of its eminent
members, science an illustrious representative, France one of her
most devoted children." The next day the Chamber, by an overwhelming
majority, voted a State funeral and a pension of £400 a year to Mdme.
Bert, with reversion to her children. The first vote was strenuously
opposed by Monseigneur Freppel, Bishop of Angers, on the ground that
the deceased was an inveterate enemy of religion, but the bishop was
ignominiously defeated by 379 votes against 45. That is probably a fair
test of the relative strength of Freethought and Christianity among
educated men in France.

Monseigneur Freppel was right Paul Bert was an inveterate enemy of
religion. He was a militant Atheist, who believed that the highest
service you can render to mankind is to free them from superstition. No
wonder the Church hated him. At a famous banquet he proposed the toast,
"The eradication of the two phylloxeras—the phylloxera of the vine
and the phylloxera of the Church." His handbook on the Morality of
the Jesuits was a frightful exposure of the duplicity and rascality of
priestcraft. About twelve months before Grambetta's death, that great
statesman took the chair at one of Paul Bert's atheistical lectures. It
was a bold thing to do, but Gambetta was a bold man. The great statesman
did a bolder thing still when he took office. He scandalised the
Christian world by appointing his atheistic friend Paul Bert as Minister
of Public Instruction and Public Worship. Surely this was a piece
of irony worthy the assiduous student of Rabelais and Voltaire.
"Clericalism is the enemy," said Gambetta. Paul Bert accepted the
battle-cry, but he did not content himself with shouting. He labored to
place education on a basis which would make it a citadel of Freethought.
The Tory Standard allows that he "laid the bases of military education
in the schools and lycees" that he "first dispensed the pupils in
State educational establishments from the obligation of attending
any religious service, or belonging to any class in which religious
instruction was given," and that he first organised the higher education
of girls.

Paul Bert was a typical Frenchman and an illustrious Atheist. What do
the clergy make of this phenomenon? Here is a man, trained by his
father to hate priests, brought up from his cradle in an atmosphere of
Freethought, and owing nothing to the Church; yet he becomes an
eminent scientist, a fervid patriot, an educational reformer, a leading
statesman, a tender husband and father, and a warm friend of the best
men, of his time; and on his decease the State gives him a public
funeral and provides for his widow and children. The man, we repeat, was
an open, nay a militant Atheist; and again we ask, What do the clergy
make of this phenomenon?

During his lifetime Darwin was the bete noir of the clergy. They hated
him with a perfect and very natural hatred, for his scientific doctrines
were revolutionary, and if he was right they and their Bible were
certainly wrong. The Black Army denounced his impious teachings from
thousands of pulpits. With some of them he was the Great Beast, with
others Antichrist himself. And they were all the madder because he never
took the slightest notice of them, but treated them with the silent
contempt which a master of the hounds bestows on the village curs
who bark at his horse's heels. Yet, strange to say, when Darwin died,
instead of being buried in some quiet Kentish cemetery or churchyard, he
was actually sepulchred in Westminster Abbey. Having fought the living
Darwin tooth and nail, the clergy quietly appropriated the dead Darwin.
The living, thinking and working man was a damnable heretic, hated of
God and his priests, but his corpse was a very good Christian, and it
was buried in a temple of the very faith he had undermined. Darwin, with
all his gravity, is said to have loved a joke, and really this was so
good a joke that he might almost have grinned at it in his coffin.

By and bye, the great naturalist may figure as an ardent devotee of the
creed he rejected. The clergy are hypocritical and base enough—as a
body we mean—to claim Darwin himself now they have secured his corpse.
Who knows that, in another twenty years, the verger or even the Dean of
Westminster Abbey, in showing visitors through the place, may not say
before a certain tomb, "Here is the last resting-place of that eminent
Christian, Charles Darwin. There was a little misunderstanding between
him and the clergy while he lived, but it has all passed away like a
mist, and he is now accounted one of the chief pillars of the Church"?

What the clergy have done in the concrete with Darwin they have done in
the abstract with his predecessors in the great struggle between light
and darkness. What are all the lying stories about Infidel Death-Beds
but conversions of corpses? Great heretics, whose scepticism was
unshaken in their lifetime by all the parson-power of the age, were
easily converted in their tombs. What the clergy said about them was
true, or why didn't they get up and contradict? All the world over
silence gives consent, and if the dead man did not enter a caveat, who
could complain if the men of God declared that he finished up in their
faith?

Recently the clergy have been converting another corpse, but this time
it has been able to protest by proxy, and the swindle has been exposed
all along the line. Paul Bert, the great French Freethinker, died at
Tonquin. The nation voted him a state funeral, and his body was
shipped to France. The voyage was a long one, and it gave the pious
an opportunity of leisurely converting the corpse, especially as Paul
Bert's family were all on board the steamer. Accordingly a report, which
we printed and commented on at the time, appeared in all the papers that
the atheistic Resident General had sent for a Catholic bishop on his
death-bed and taken the sacrament. Thousands of Christians believed the
story at once, the wish being father to the thought. They never stopped
to inquire whether the report was true. Why indeed should they? They
took the whole of their religion on trust, and of course they could
easily dispense with proof in so small a matter as an infidel's
conversion. Some of them were quite hilarious. "Ha," they exclaimed,
"what do you Freethinkers say now?" And with the childish simplicity of
their kind, when they were told that the story was in all probability
false, they replied, "Why, isn't it in print?"

Now that the fraud is exposed very few of the journals that printed it
will publish the contradiction. We may be sure that the story of Paul
Bert's conversion will be devoutly believed by thousands of Christians,
and will probably be worked up in pious tracts for the spiritual
edification of superstitious sheep. Give a lie a day's start, said
Cobbett, and it is half round the world before you can overtake it. Give
it a week's start, and if it happens to be a lie that suits the popular
taste, you may give up all hope of overtaking it at all. First in
the way of exposure was a telegram from the Papal Nuncio at Lisbon on
December 29, saying that his name had been improperly used. He was not
the author of the telegram that had been fathered on him, and he knew
nothing of Paul Bert's conversion. A day or two later the ship conveying
the heretic's corpse arrived at the Suez Canal. Madame Bert heard of
the preposterous story of her husband's conversion, and she immediately
telegraphed that it was absolutely and entirely false. Madame Bert, who
is a highly accomplished woman, is a Freethinker herself, and she is too
proud of her husband's reputation to lose a moment in contradicting a
miserable libel on his courage and sincerity.

Before dropping the pen, we take the opportunity of saying a few words
on Madame Adam's article on Paul Bert in the Contemporary Review. She
is an able woman, but not a philosopher, and she labors under the
craze of thinking that she is a great force in European politics. She
confesses that she hated Paul Bert, and she betrays that her aversion
originated in pique and jealousy. We do not wish to be ungallant, but
Gambetta had good reasons for preferring Paul Bert to Juliette Lambert,
although the lady is ludicrously wrong in saying that "it was to Paul
Bert that Gambetta owed all the formulae of his scientific politics."
She forgets that Gambetta's speeches before Paul Bert became his friend
are in print. She also ignores the fact that Gambetta was a stedfast
Freethinker from his college days, and was never infected with that
sentimental religiosity from which she assumes that Paul Bert perverted
him. Certainly he was incapable of being moved by the hackneyed
platitudes about science and religion that form the prelude of Madame
Adam's article, and seem borrowed from one of M. Oaro's lectures. Nor
did he need Paul Bert to tell him, after the terrible struggle of 1877,
that Clericalism was the enemy. Still less, if that were possible,
did he require Paul Bert or any other man to tell him that France
imperatively needed education free from priestcraft. Madame Adam is so
anxious to deal Paul Bert a stab in the dark that she confuses the most
obvious facts. Gambetta and he fought against clericalism, and labored
for secular education, because they were both Freethinkers as well as
Republicans. In venting her spite, and reciting her own witticisms, she
fails to see the force of her own admissions. This is what she writes of
a very momentous occasion:

"I saw Gambetta at Saint Cloud the Sunday after the mishap at
Obaronne. He had just been taking the chair at the Chateau d'Eau, at an
anti-clerical meeting of Paul Bert's.

"He came in a little late to dinner. Some dozen of us were already
assembled on a flight of steps at the bottom of the garden when he
appeared. He spied me at once [a woman speaks!] across the green lawn
and a vase of tall fuchsias, and called out in his sonorous voice:

"'Admirable! superb! extraordinary! Never since Voltaire has such an
irrefutable indictment been brought against the clergy! And what a
style! What consummate art!'

"'And what bad policy!' said a great banker who was with us, in a low
voice, to me [note the me].

"Gambetta went on as he approached us:

"'And such an immense success—beyond anything that could be imagined!
Ten thousand enthusiastic cheers!'

"'The ten thousand and first would not have come from me,' I said [said
I], as we greeted one another.

"'You yourself,' cried Gambetta, 'you yourself, I tell you, would
have been carried away; if not by the ideas, by the genius lavished in
propounding them.'"

Yes, and notwithstanding Madame Adam's "religion" and the great banker's
"policy," Gambetta and Paul Bert were in the right, and miles above
their heads.

Following Madame Adam's lively nonsense, the Echo says that Paul Bert
tried to set up another Inquisition. "In France," says this organ of
Christian Radicalism, "they strive to prevent a parent from giving his
child a religious education." They do nothing of the kind. They simply
insist that the religious education shall not be given in the national
school. Every French parent is free to give religious instruction to his
children at home, and there are still thousands of State priests who can
supply his deficiencies in that respect. Meanwhile national education
progresses in good earnest. The Empire left nearly half the population
unable to write their names. Now the Republic educates every boy and
girl, and Mr. Matthew Arnold assures us that the French schools are
among the best in Europe, while the sale of good books is prodigious.
Gambetta and Paul Bert worked, fought, and sacrificed for this, and they
cannot be robbed of the glory.